EXCERPT

I will write a love poem.

I thought the baby bunnies were dead—heard the mewl before dawn, and the thump of the cat door, came out to see four bodies on the rug. I scooped them up to take them out to the compost heap and they squirmed 

  in my hands. I knew then that they were dead, still. Just not yet. You wouldn’t think it, but in spring there is always something dying. I told the children, We’ll do what we can, but they won’t make it. When my friend wrote, I made a list of all the things / I could not save, my mind began

unfurling the lost, the curling words. My days were a list of all the things I could not save. Nonetheless, I drove to get raw goat milk, made a nest of hay, dried leaves, and towel by the heater. I risked

loving the tiny soft body in my palm. Warmed the milk, lifted the dropper to their miniature lips. Again. Again. Again.

ABOUT THE POET

Adrie Rose lives next to an orchard in western MA and is the editor of Nine Syllables Press. Her chapbook Rupture is forthcoming with Gold Line Press in 2024. She is a Poetry MFA student at Warren Wilson College. Her work has previously appeared in The Baltimore Review, Nimrod, The Night Heron Barks, Underblong, Witness, and more. She won the Elizabeth Babcock Poetry Prize, the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize, and the Gertrude Posner Spencer Prize in 2021, and the Anne Bradstreet Prize, the Eleanor Cederstrom Prize, and the Mary Augusta Jordan Prize in 2022. Find her on Instagram @AdrieRose_.

NOTES

Work in this chapbook first appeared in The Champagne Room and Beloit Poetry Journal.

OTHER BOOKS

Rupture (Gold Line Press, 2024)

what others are saying

Adrie Rose’s I Will Write a Love Poem is a book of trying, risk, tenderness, and resistance. The poems recount dark times as they reach for brightness, asking, “how much violence begins this pastoral”? Anthems to resilience, their common form—loose prose poems with leaps, gaps, and staggers—mirrors how we fracture but hold together all at once. Rose writes of the body—bones that barnacle, veins blue as calligraphy, a hand branded by a horse’s hoof—and of trying to love the self as is, and as she leaves what she must behind. In this generous book, songs are spells, the unspeakable is spoken, and broken things are rendered whole.  

— Rebecca Olander, author of Uncertain Acrobats

I Will Write a Love Poem fits an immense world into a few pages. At the other end of the horse’s pail, the sleeping infant, and the naked pool, there is an insistent life—a life that will keep rising and embarking on the steep trail. Rose’s lines of verse are at once lush and sturdy. She may take us into the cuts, but if we hold onto this “bright rope,” love will find our breath. 

— Priscilla Wathington, author of Paper and Stick